[wp-hackers] Character Encoding Hell (and filtering /n to <p>)

[Alex Andrews]

Currently programming a plugin and can't for the life of me work out
the reason my foreign characters aren't displaying right.

In my header I have the following <meta http-equiv="content-type"
content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> . The capital e accute
characters turn out as ? , not rendering correctly at all.

In the MySQL database, the collation is set to utf8_unicode_ci on all
of the table and all of the fields for the plugin. Now that is...I
just changed these over use phpmyadmin from latin1_swedish_ci to
utf8_unicode_ci because I thought this would mean my É characters
would turn out correctly. This didn't solve the problem at all.

I have numerous functions that take cells from the database and sticks
them in bits of the plugin output. However, it never works, until I
use Safari to change the text encoding to Western (ISO Latin 1). The
page re-renders then it shows the characters right.

I don't know what to do and I am considering hurling computers out of windows...

More simple question, very much secondary: what filter other than
wp_textualize convert new lines and various spacings into HTML, adding
p and br tags - as is done with all posts...

Any help would be hugely, hugely appreciated.

Thanks a lot

Alex